Musical Structures and Animusic

For quite a while now I have been wanting to build musical instruments, but not your standard instruments. I took great inspiration from the following clips (there are many more but these are my favourites). Obviously not wanting to copy these ideas but the concept of a musical instrument actually being able to play its self seemed unimaginable, impossible... so i have to try it at some point!!!





Me an Matthew Merrick have talked about collaborating on this in passing, but its more of an issue of time and money so nothing has currently come to fruition. But seems some body else has beaten my to a similar idea.

These are magnificent structures built to play music. They are amazing in the way they look and i am sure in the way they sound (unfortunately all videos have been made private so i can not say for certain)

Music for Airports : Brian Eno

Music for Airports is an album of generative music by Brian Eno.

He composed and recorded lots of loops of different lengths (similar to how Jem Fimer Worked - see post from 1/1/11) so that they went out of sync each time around creating evolving music.

If you have never listened to this album before, it is essential that you do!!! Its a brilliant album, and its one of the most relaxing, I listen to it quite often when trying to de-stress :-)

Take a listen after the jump

Interactive Music : Music Composed out of Dance and Movement : Palindrome

Palindrome are a group who use motion tracking and technology within performances, this technology triggers musical elements. Its a form of interactive, generative music.

You can fine their website at www.palindrome.de, I would link specific pages and videos, but its a website that uses frames so its a bit more complicated than that.

Their videos are well worth a look and they have explanations of the technology they use and how they use it.

If you have any interest in generative music or interactive music, then this website is a must to check out. It really helped me with my work in the final year of my degree.

Enjoy

A Year In MP3 : Luke Dubois

Luke Dubois, who works for Cycling 74 (the company that brought us the amazingness that is Max/MSP/Jitter - more on that in a later post I am sure) and who helped create Jitter, started a project in September of 2009 whereby he made a new piece of generative music every single day!

To me this is amazing and some of the music produced is fantastic!! I advise anybody with any interest in generative music, music in general, computers... actually scrap that. I advise EVERYBODY to look at this!! Unfortunately, to my disappointment there is nothing online that gives any information as to how the pieces where produced, but that just makes them magical :-)

Just click the following like to check it out!

http://music.columbia.edu/%7Eluke/year/index.shtml

Happy 11th Birthday Longplayer

For my first post on this here HUB, I would like to wish a happy 11th birthday to Jem Fimer's Longplayer.

Jem Fimer, the banjo player and one of the founding members of the Pogues (very famous this time of year for that song - Fairy Tale of New York) went on to writing a piece of generative music called Longplayer. It was started on the strike of midnight the 1st of January 2000 and the piece was written in such a way that it will play, with out repetition, for 1000 years!!

Using similar techniques as Brian Eno on his album Music For Airports, Jem has recorded lots of loops of different lengths, and they will not come back in to sync with each other till the year 3000. Unlike Brian Eno who used long tape loops cut to precise lengths, Jem used computers - lets hope if doesn't crash.

For more information check out its website here.

And make sure you have a listen in by clicking here.